Creating Audiences in Didactic Poetry

This paper deals with the use of second persons in Virgil’s Georgics: we should distinguish between the

addressee (Maecenas) and imagined figures that are not addressed but rather apostrophized. Apostrophe

is poetic, creative figure of speech and thus a potential vehicle for artifice or representation (see Quint.

Inst. 9.1.11, 9.2.26-7 and Culler 1981: 134-46). Thus it opens space within didactic poetry’s generally

veridical discourse for fiction: the poet is free to fashion the apostrophized “audience” as he likes, since

From a formal point of view, Horatian satires, especially his ‘diatribe’ satires, strongly resemble other didactic poetry; and yet they are rarely explicitly studied as such. Even though the complexities of Horatian irony arguably set his Sermones apart from the more ‘serious’ genres of didactic verse and Cynic diatribe, it is the contention of this paper that even Horace’s ironized doctores inepti enter in a productive dialogue with multiple audiences both inside and outside the poem’s narrative frame.

This paper will examine how recurrent images in De Rerum Natura (DRN) form a central and coherent aspect of Lucretius’ didactic program and his relationship with his audience.

To a first degree of approximation the authors of ancient didactic works were the peers and social equals of their audience members (Thibodeau 2011, 33–7). Yet in the archetypical scene of instruction, that involving a child student and an adult teacher, the student clearly occupies a subordinate social position vis-à-vis the instructor.